I promised myself a rest today, nothing, that was my intention. You know what they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It started off restful, I slept in and enjoyed my breakfast at about 8am. Yes, 8am is now officially considered a sleep in again. While I was having my breakfast, one of my passengers came running over to me and informed me that the hotel would not give her, her passport back. Odd. I went up and attempted to sort it out, to which the snarky girl on reception told me, I can only give the passports to the tour leader. Imagine her face when I said, I am the tour leader! She says to me that I must take all the passports, I tell her that this in unacceptable as the group will not be aware that I have all the passports. She finally relents and says, that with my permission they will return the passports to the passengers when they ask for them. I leave and go back to my breakfast, knowing deep down from my experience in Turkey, that this debacle, isn't over.

I return to my room and spend the best part of the day updating my non existent trip notes, from Beijing to St Petersburg and then watching re-runs of Supernatural and ogling Jensen Ackles. At about 1pm, I decide to walk down the street to the restaurant to make a reservation for tonight's farewell dinner, you don't normally need one, but as I have sixteen people I thought I should make one. That process seemed to go ok and I was told, no reservation needed, just come. Hmmmm…..this also isn't over, I thought.

While I was out I decided to have a better look around St Petersburg. I broke my promise to myself about resting, by walking all the way to the Peter and Paul fortress and beyond! For those who don't know, that's probably about 6km, behind it, there's also a magnificent blue mosque, that looks like it should probably belong in Iran. There was some kind of renaissance fair on at the fortress, I wish I had been less tired by this point, I would have gone in.

I got the metro back and had a quick shower and met the group for dinner. I was right, the passport debacle wasn't over. Alan saw me coming and said, Please tell me you have our passports? I of course didn't have the passports. The stupid hotel, even after the talking to I have given them earlier in the day, were still not returning peoples passports to them. So before dinner I went up and collected all the passports with the passengers, again telling the hotel, how totally unacceptable this was. Lemmings.

We went to the restaurant, and as predicted, that wasn't over either. I went in and was met with Niet. I'm starting to hate that word as much as Yok. Both are negative words, akin to out word no, in Russian and Turkish respectively. So much for just come! Luckily, Kate had been to a great traditional place earlier in the day, and it wasn't far so we decided to go there. We had dinner and then we had a few drinks at the hotel bar a bit later on. I ended up in the Sky bar at the hotel with Alan, Moy and Andy, paying up beerwise for Listvyanka. I eventually went to bed around 1am, I loose nearly the whole group tomorrow and am only left with four people!